🇧🇬 Bulgaria · Veliko Tarnovo and the north
Veliko Tarnovo is the most striking city in inland Bulgaria: the old medieval capital, 'the city of the tsars', with stone and timber houses climbing in tiers up the gorges of the Yantra river and, crowning it all, the Tsarevets fortress outlined on a hill that the river almost entirely embraces. For two centuries the tsars of the Second Bulgarian Empire ruled from here, and you can still feel that past of power at every viewpoint.
Its great symbol is Tsarevets, the walled citadel that held the royal palace and the patriarchate, with the rebuilt patriarchal church at the top and, on summer nights, a spectacular Sound and Light show that lights up the whole hill. Below, in the Asenova quarter, medieval churches survive such as that of the Forty Holy Martyrs, tied to the origins of the empire, and in the historic centre beats the Samovodska charshia, the artisans' market street.
This guide walks you through Veliko Tarnovo in practical terms: what to see at Tsarevets and in the historic centre and what it costs, when the Sound and Light show takes place, how to get there by train or bus from Sofia, Ruse and Varna, where to find the best views of the Yantra and how to add the museum village of Arbanasi. A city where Bulgarian medieval history can be touched with your hands.
Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1393), one of the great states of medieval Europe. It all began in 1185, when the brothers Asen and Peter, Bulgarian nobles, led in this city the rebellion that ended Byzantine rule and proclaimed the new empire, with Tarnovo as its capital. On Tsarevets hill the tsars' palace and the Orthodox patriarchate were built, and the city became a great political, religious and cultural centre, the cradle of the Tarnovo Literary School. In 1393 it fell after a long siege to the Ottomans, who burned it, and Bulgaria remained under their rule for almost five centuries. After the liberation of 1878, the first Constituent Assembly met in Tarnovo and the Tarnovo Constitution of 1879 was approved. We tell all of that on our history page.
Read the full history ↓In the north, Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire and the birthplace of the country's first constitution; on the banks of the Danube, Ruse looks towards Romania with the air of a little Vienna.
Read the history of Veliko Tarnovo and the north →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities have such a dramatic setting as Veliko Tarnovo. The Yantra river, as it cuts through the folds of the Balkan range, draws a series of very tight meanders here that leave hills almost surrounded by water, with vertical slopes. On those hills — Tsarevets, Trapezitsa, Momina krepost — peoples looking for natural protection settled from very early on.
There were settlements in Thracian times and later Roman and Byzantine ones: the heights of Tsarevets were fortified from the first centuries AD, and Trapezitsa filled up over time with churches. For centuries, however, Tarnovo was just one more stronghold among the many on the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgarians, of no special importance. Nothing suggested that, at the end of the 12th century, this city perched above the river would become the capital of one of the most powerful empires in eastern Europe.
The key lay in politics. In 1018, after centuries of war, the First Bulgarian Empire had been conquered by Byzantium, and Bulgaria came under the rule of Constantinople. But discontent over taxes and Byzantine government kept growing, above all among the local nobility. In Tarnovo, that discontent would find its leaders.
In 1185, two brothers of the Bulgarian nobility, Theodore (who would take the name Peter) and Ivan Asen, led a rebellion in Tarnovo against Byzantine rule. Tradition has it that the uprising was proclaimed in the church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki, in the Asenova quarter, presenting the saint's help to the Bulgarian cause as miraculous. The revolt caught fire, and after years of fighting the Asens managed to drive the Byzantines out of the northern Balkans and restore an independent Bulgarian state: the Second Bulgarian Empire, with Tarnovo as its capital.
Over the following two centuries, Tarnovo was the centre of power. On Tsarevets hill the tsars' palace was built, with its halls and its tower, and at the summit the residence of the Orthodox patriarch, because the restored empire also restored its autonomous Church. The city grew with walls, towers, hundreds of houses and countless churches, many of them on the neighbouring hill of Trapezitsa. Tarnovo saw itself as the 'Third Rome' and the 'new Constantinople', heir to imperial and religious prestige.
The moment of greatest glory came with Tsar Ivan Asen II (1218-1241), who extended the Bulgarian borders to three seas and defeated the Byzantines of the Despotate of Epirus at the battle of Klokotnitsa in 1230. To celebrate, he ordered the church of the Forty Holy Martyrs to be built in Tarnovo, where he had the account of his victory carved on a column; that inscription is today one of the most valuable documents in Bulgarian history. Under his reign, Tarnovo was one of the most brilliant capitals in medieval Europe.
Tarnovo was not only political power: it was a great cultural hub. In the 14th century the Tarnovo Literary School emerged, a movement of monks and scholars — whose towering figure was the patriarch Euthymius (Evtimiy) — that reformed the language and spelling of Church Slavonic Bulgarian, copied and translated texts, and produced illuminated manuscripts of great beauty, such as the famous Gospel of Tsar Ivan Alexander. That intellectual output influenced the whole Orthodox Europe, from Serbia to Russia and Romania. Tarnovo was at once a court, a patriarchate and a monastic university.
But a new power was advancing across the Balkans: the Ottoman Turks. Through the 14th century the Bulgarian empire, divided and weakened by infighting, kept losing ground to the Ottomans, who conquered city after city. In 1393, after a three-month siege, Tarnovo fell. The troops of Sultan Bayezid I took the city, burned the palace and the churches of Tsarevets and massacred or deported much of the population; the patriarch Euthymius, according to tradition, was sent into exile. The fall of the capital marked the effective end of the medieval Bulgarian state. A few years later the whole country came under Ottoman rule, which would last almost five centuries.
Over that long period, Tarnovo stopped being a capital and was reduced to a provincial town, although it kept its importance as a Christian and trading centre. The ruins of Tsarevets, burned and abandoned, became the melancholy symbol of a lost greatness that Bulgarians would not forget.
Between the 18th and 19th centuries, with the Bulgarian Revival (Vazrazhdane), Tarnovo came back to life. The craft guilds and the merchants prospered, the stone and timber houses we admire today on the Samovodska charshia were built, and the city became one of the hubs of the Bulgarian national awakening, with schools, churches and a growing sense of identity against Ottoman rule. The memory of the old imperial capital fed patriotic pride.
Liberation came in 1877-1878, with the Russo-Turkish War that gave Bulgaria back its independence. And it was precisely to Tarnovo, the old capital, that the new state's first Constituent Assembly was summoned in 1879. There the Tarnovo Constitution was debated and approved, one of the most liberal of its time in Europe, establishing a constitutional monarchy and laying the foundations of the Principality (and later Kingdom) of Bulgaria. The choice of city was no accident: by holding the assembly in Tarnovo, Bulgarians asserted the continuity between the medieval empire and the modern state. That is why the adjective Veliko ('great') was added to the city: Veliko Tarnovo, Great Tarnovo.
Through the 20th century, in modern Bulgaria, the city kept that symbolic weight. The walls and the patriarchal church of Tsarevets were partly restored, the historic Revival quarter was protected and Veliko Tarnovo became a university city and one of the country's great cultural destinations.
Today Veliko Tarnovo is, for many, the most beautiful city in inland Bulgaria and a place where medieval history is still alive. The Tsarevets fortress, with its rebuilt walls and the patriarchal church at the top, crowns the hill embraced by the Yantra, and on special nights the Sound and Light show — created in 1985 — lights up the whole slope with floodlights, lasers and bells telling the rise and fall of the empire. Below, in the Asenova quarter, the old churches and the monument to the Asen dynasty recall the founders of the medieval state.
The historic centre, with its houses hanging over the river and the artisans' street Samovodska charshia, keeps the atmosphere of the Bulgarian Revival, with workshops of potters, glass blowers and jewellers. The presence of a large university fills the city with students, cafés and cultural life, and on the neighbouring hill the museum village of Arbanasi rounds off the visit with its fortress-houses and its fresco-covered churches.
Looking out from a viewpoint at the houses tiered above the Yantra gorges, with Tsarevets outlined in the background, is to understand why Bulgarians call this 'the city of the tsars'. Eight hundred years after the Asen brothers proclaimed their rebellion here, Veliko Tarnovo is still the historic heart of Bulgaria, the place where the country remembers its medieval greatness and celebrates the birth of its modern state.